Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality (13 page)

A spike drives up through the middle of my brain. My muscles feel like floating ash. The dot loops around Toby's ear.

“Who's there?” Toby says, a little quiet, the way you'd speak into the dark when woken by a burglar's footsteps.

When the dot squiggles toward my crotch, I do a flailing jumping jack and land on my knees in the snow crust. Next thing, we're both in the dirt, covering our heads as the dot makes angry cursive over us, doing evasive roll moves, scrunching our heads into our shoulders.

The dot spirals wide and slow across the cornfields and, eventually, settles on my forehead.

“Get down Nate, oh God—NO! Don't shoot!” Toby says. The lettering on his Drew Bledsoe jersey is visible when he crawls back into the car and ducks into the seat well.

I crawl behind the car, gravel stabbing my knees. I look up from behind the trunk. For no reason, I say: “Necro?”

The dot pauses.

Then, the dot jerks toward my chest, then to my crotch, then back toward my chest and down again, like it's either nodding up-and-down Yes, or bludgeoning me. The dot then scribbles up and down my arms and my chest and legs, like it's trying to color me in.

I think: Coloring me in, Necro? Like coloring me in because I'm dead inside?

“Either shoot us or show yourself!” Toby yells from inside the car.

Then, slowly, the dot moves up the leg of my nylon running pants, my sweatshirt, up to my collarbone, crawling toward my eye like an insect I can't feel, and I decide, surprisingly quickly, surprisingly practically, that it's probably better to die this way rather than go on embarrassing myself the way I have. The laser point pierces my eye, and I feel some microheat on my eyebrows, and it moves to my forehead, and with the efficiency of a bank withdrawal I accept death, and I cramp my eyelids shut to brace for the bullet and, then, the point disappears.

A leftover dot-shaped, orange-sherbet-colored stain drifts in my eye. I can't see the corn or the patch of pine trees across the street. The snow crunches when I move any part of me—ice grains rolling over ice grains. No branches crack from the woods, no footsteps.

When I get back into the car, I think I hear Toby sniffle.

“You all right?” I say.

“You will never be able to win an argument with me again,” he says. “If you still think you're friends with Necro. All I'm saying, if you still think you're friends.”

I start the engine. I turn on the headlights. We don't hear a single thing at all.

Back home, the dark from the cornfield and the tracers of the laser pointer have settled into my spine. I keep from looking at anything for too long—the spoon rest on the oven, the paint-spattered radio on top of the fridge—just in case another dot appears. Sleep never works, so I settle on an all-night High School Frito Pace-Off.

The uncrumpling of the Fritos bag is loud, like announcing it to a racetrack. I set the bag on one end of the kitchen table and a glass of milk on the other. Then I walk a lap around the table, handful some chips into my mouth, and reach the glass of milk just as I'm done chewing.

“Nate?” someone says.

Fake Dad No. 3 velvets his way into the kitchen from the living room, bare legs under his purple bathrobe, Thor-mane in a ponytail.

“I was sleeping on the couch,” he says, leaning against the oven and thumb-knuckling the corner of his eye to uncrust
it. “There was a great documentary on Lake Canandaigua. Canandaigua—do you know what that word means?”

Through the kitchen window, the sky milks up with pre-sunrise. He answers his own question. “It means ‘the chosen place.' Isn't that interesting? That we have a body of water that was regarded as ‘the chosen place?'”

I'm too busy Frito-chewing to even notice what he literally, actually says next: “You remind me of a story. One time, my friend Theebs, we called him that, he and I were camping in Nevada. He met a lady there, at the campgrounds, who had a prosthetic hand. Just two pincers to grip the phone when she talked girl-talk with her girlfriends. But Theebs, always seeking a connection, thought this lady was so ravishing, in the face, that he offered to smoke with her our hash, and she said she'd meet him later that night—with the caveat that love's arbitrary yet fluid currents might bring them closer.”

I hear a coughing in the walls. The shower's turning on: Mom.

“We'd already been drinking Carlo Rossi; already were in the bag,” he says. “So Theebs went out, met her, and returned to our tent nearly doubled over in pain.”

I wipe the salt on my pajama pants and, before I even think about why he's telling me this, I admittedly admit that I'm sort of cracking up here. “Wait wait wait wait,” I go. “A Terminator Reacharound?”

Which, obviously, reminds me of something that happened both to Necro and Lip Cheese, and they know exactly what I'm talking about.

“That's very funny,” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “A lot of richness.”

“That actually happened to your friend?”

“And me, too.” He reaches for his robe sash. “Would you care to see the scars?”

I whip my entire body away from him. “No! Don't!”

“Kidding! You're a pushover.” He crosses his ankles and his robe slides back past his right knee. “I know you think I'm the Homosexual Time Lord, or what not. But might I make you a proposition, Nate, which you are free to ignore.”

I pour myself a new glass of milk and down it like a shot. Since he's already insulted much of himself for me, I say: “Okay, sure.”

“I've heard you talk on the phone to your friends, and I think you might find the loam of my offer to be particularly fertile. I have my chosen place, as well. Every summer, I go to a retreat, outside Philadelphia, near King of Prussia. Have you been—to King? of Prussia?”

“It's named a king?”

“It's a series of three-day retreats—although they offer longer engagements that intersplice multiple disciplines—in a confined, but wooded, natural creative space with yeomanic clearings, stone farmhouses amid the tall grass. It's run through the Continual Center Foundation, which is world renowned, completely legitimate. The meditation technique is based on Vipassana—a twenty-five-hundred-year-old form of idea-incubation that means, loosely, truthful observation. It's a way of eliminating war, eliminating suffering.” His right hand pans from his left arm outward across his body. “It
would be challenging, excruciating. You wouldn't be able to talk at all—except for obvious emergencies—but eventually, after multiple sessions and efforting toward an essence-forward life, you'd come out of it not needing to prove yourself to anyone. I donate very regularly there. And if you were interested in such a means of self-excavation, well, I could make that happen. We draw a ragtag band: everyone from ex-offenders to corporate executives. Yours for the low price of tender loving care!”

When I think of Pennsylvania, it reminds me of Greta Hollund, who I kind of liked even though I only saw her from across the cafeteria, and who wore plaid pants and had buttons on her book bag straps. She went to college in Philadelphia. When the kids go back to school every September, I'll put “Hysteria” on repeat, in her honor or something, and I'll do a Sad Archives Transfer, and re-rig my stomach to feel what I imagine she felt when she was younger. And I'll imagine myself shrinking, like the thin white rectangle after you turn off an old TV, until I think to go do something else.

“Also—because I do walk the walk,” Fake Dad No. 3 says, reaching for the Frito bag, “I remember when I was monetarily and spiritually low. My first wife left me, so I blew five credit cards backpacking through South America. When I got back, I couldn't find work. I was thirty-two. I moved into the basement of a house of grad students. All the dishes ended up in my room, because I was too depressed to carry them to the dishwasher when I finished eating. I tried to read self-help books, but self-help books are all written by people
who are already successful, right? They would never need their own advice. And I couldn't reconcile that. Finally, I went to King of Prussia, in 1989, for this retreat. Could you imagine if you knew that several times a year you didn't have to talk to anybody? I almost moved there for it.”

“But, so, why Mom?” I say.

He looks toward the ceiling and sighs. “That's an astute question,” he says, because he says every question is a good question. “Debra commits herself. Gary: Did you take your Donnatal? Are you transferring your medical records? You have meditation on Tuesday, not Monday.”

“I feel like I can never complain about anything with her,” I tell him.

“I can't speak for that,” he says. “But I can say, us guys, you and me,”—he nudges his elbow at me—“the other night, alone, at my apartment, I called GE to walk me through how to use the washing machine in my own complex's basement. Men won't spend their money; men will count the pasta noodles she bought before she left us.”

Which, okay, is about a 4.1 on the Scale of Funny.

“The retreat would be free. It'd be in the summer. It would be an intense challenge. But a chance, for the mind.”

“I would have to think about it.”

Because I begin to feel something as this conversation ends. And the last time I felt it was when Real Dad drove all the way to Fairport so we could go sledding at Brooks Hill, which had the best sledding hill in Rochester. It was Super Bowl Sunday, with the Bears playing later. The other sledders packed snow together to build a jump, and poured water on it
for added momentum. Skidding a glove across the snow, saliva freezing on your coat zipper, it was like the ground was punching up at us when me and Real Dad's sled plunged toward the jump, and then everything went quiet and airborne, and that, I guess, was family for three seconds.

But Mom's shower gulps to a stop. Fake Dad No. 3 sets his vitamin jars on the kitchen table, and I dive under my bed covers and pretend I've been asleep. And the next day, I totally Walk Down Faggot Lane when I meet Toby at the Airplane Booth.

“Something about a retreat sounded kind of interesting,” I tell him. “Wouldn't you be almost relieved? To walk away completely?”

A French fry falls out of Toby's mouth. I blush for even bringing up the subject. Blush enough to come back home and tell Fake Dad No. 3: “I don't think so.”

“But you're considering it,” Fake Dad No. 3 says. “I can see it in your face; view of the lake? Simple breakfast in the morning? I'll bring pamphlets! I'm eager to help.”

Eager to help. Like he, Necro, and Garrett Alfieri can walk into a room, offer help, and expect everyone to start licking themselves in strange tongues.

“Nothing against you, but a retreat sounds stupid to me,” I say, a little harder.

Tell me I need some retreat, when, later, I go to bed, and I'm staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and I get this tickly feeling. Like how after any party, I'd walk home, wishing the world was a quiet, empty lit town where the sun never came up and high school kids walked around
outside. Cutting through store lots and peoples' backyards, I'd start to talk to myself, whispering one-liners—“Nine out of every ten sportscasters prefer Just For Men Beard Coloring!”—whispering louder and louder and louder.

For spring, though, to combat the Springtime Breezes of Fear, I decide that I am Going to Be Happy. So I don't call Necro (who never calls anymore anyway), or Lip Cheese, or Toby. There's literally no Fires Gone Wild Cancun Fuckfest through all of March. So I stop checking NecronicA, and spend more time outside sitting on benches around town, where it's flu-warm, enough for the shops to prop their doors open on rubber-bottomed kickstands.

The cashier at the 7-Eleven asks me How you doing, and I tell him, “Everything's chugging along!” and I pause and look closely to see if there's any change in his face, to see if I've caused him to look deep into the sad trash that is his life.

A few times, I even visit Wicked College John, who is now at the rehabilitation section of the hospital. He can stand now; he shuffles around the bed in his room, and I nod approvingly. He turns his head and looks at me for a few seconds. “TV?” he says, and then, in another visit, he says, “This
show? Hellstache?” and then, in another, “Let's listen to that Rusted Root bootleg now.”

Back home, Mom is microwaving a cookie for dessert. “Jobs? Anything?”

“Had some really exciting conversations!” I say, after I interview with the managers at Zabb's and Java Joe's and Dick's Sporting Goods. And on the back of a grocery receipt, Mom writes down numbers of some temp agencies I haven't called.

The next morning, in the kitchen, when I handful Product 19 from the box for breakfast, Fake Dad No. 3 stirs up a fiber drink and asks how I am.

“Doing great, spiritually!” I say. And on my bed, he leaves pamphlets for the retreat. There's a green background and a picture of a mountain on the front and the address of the retreat center. The text on the inner flap has a heading, in a cursive font, that says:
THE BUFFALO THAT ROAM THE MIND.
On a Post-it stuck to the pamphlet, Fake Dad No. 3 has written, in the teacher-like scribble I'd get on homework papers: “Great for exploring excess & what we discussed!”